Prior perusal of the opening pages of Varisco’s 2007 Reading Orientalism: Said and Unsaid did not raise hopes for his briefing “Khutba vs. Khutzpa: Islamophobia on the Internet.” In this book, Varisco analyzes leftwing intellectual Edward Said’s Orientalism and its legacy, expressing agreement “with most of Said’s political positions on the real Orient.” Varisco reveals his discipleship of Said with condemnations of post-World War II United States having “become by stealth and wealth the neo-colonial superpower” in which a “neocon clique…engineered the wars” not just “against” Iraq but also Afghanistan. Varisco’s one-sided estimate of historical harms includes a “PhD cataloguing of what the West did to the East and self-unfillfulling political punditry about what real individuals in the East say they want to do to the West.”

Yet, Varisco writes, “Said hardly scratched the surface of the vast sewerage of racist and ethnocentrist writing, art, and cinema that for so long has severed an imaginary East from the dominating West.” “In particular,” Varisco emphasizes,

almost anything that Muslims would consider holy has at one time or another been profaned by Western writers. Perhaps the frustrated worldwide Muslim anger at Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was emetic justice for centuries of vicious and malicious verbal abuse from the West, where this controversial best seller incubated.

Both matters of principle and practicality deter further reading of Varisco. “Truth with a capital T does not exist for anyone,” Varisco nonsensically proclaims as one of his “own operational truths,” thereby placing in doubt Varisco’s views. Varisco’s attempts at humor also do not amuse, such as when he describes the book’s “anal citational flow of endnotes” designed to allow a person to “read for entertainment” Varisco’s turgid tome.

Nothing improved during Varisco’s presentation on “Islamophobia,” described in a Powerpoint image referencing a 1991 Runnymede Trust report as an “unfounded hostility” towards all things and persons Muslim. One Powerpoint on “Combatting Islamophobia on the Internet” set a leveling tone with a recommendation of a “[f]ocus on interfaith efforts, noting that all religions have positive and negative aspects.” This accorded with Varisco’s prior call for scholars to “be doing all we can to refute the notion that Islam is intrinsically more violent than other religions.” “I am not saying that these things don’t happen,” Varisco conceded when showing a picture of a woman undergoing a sharia stoning to death. Another Powerpoint, meanwhile, simply dismissed as “fallacy” controversies that “Muhammad was a pedophile and Islam is cruel to women.”

In discussing the 1797 American treaty with Tripoli, meanwhile, Varisco bizarrely claimed that “we were doing a lot of trade” with the Barbary States. As any schoolboy should know, though, this treaty, including a tribute payment, was part of American trade protection efforts against Barbary pirate depredations scourging the Mediterranean for centuries. Varisco then noted with a Powerpoint image America’s subsequent Barbary Wars resulting from the failure of diplomacy to dissuade the Barbary pirates from their attacks. “Economics is always in there somewhere,” Varisco stated in a similarly bizarre fashion when discussing the United States’ first encounter with jihadists.

The little discussed elephant in the room for perceptive “Islamophobia” observers during Varisco’s presentation, though, was “Islamophobe” Number One, Jihad Watch website founder Spencer. Varisco cited a Spencer quotation from his book Inside Islam: A Guide for Catholics listed at the website Spencer Watch. Varisco once again failed to explain why Spencer’s condemnations of Islam as an “often downright false revelation” and “threat to the world at large” were unacceptable. Varisco also noted a recent Jihad Watch entry criticizing his very Georgetown briefing.

Audience questions, however, focused on Spencer. Varisco discussed his refusal to debate Spencer as “someone who just hates Islam,” yet claimed that in any hypothetical encounter he “would beat the whatever out of him.” ACMCU head John Esposito concurred with the “Combatting Islamophobia in the Internet” assessment of “little value in debating Islamophobic speakers in academic settings since it gives them a forum.” Such encounters with Spencer “would be enhancing his credibility.” Yet in discussing partisan websites, Esposito complained that “nobody accepts the other side as objective.” “Cranks” like Spencer, an audience member meanwhile argued, belonged at Hyde Park Corner.

Although Esposito dismissed Spencer as a scholar, he nonetheless sneered that he wrote “best-selling books” while discussing worries about Spencer’s popularity. Noting the influence of popular culture, Esposito complained that “Islamophobic websites score very, very high.” Varisco bemoaned that such websites outperformed his own Tabsir website and without irony cited a need for people like him to create “more books…that people can read.”

Amidst this uniform opposition to Spencer et al. from fewer than 20 people in the briefing room, one audience member sounded an independent note. Observing that he was the only black person in the room, the young man discussed how he did not see Spencer’s work as a “race issue” but rather as opposition to Islamic extremism. Because of this “my country is in ruins now” he said with respect to the Somali homeland of his Muslim father.

Varisco answered by attributing violence in Somalia and other majority-Muslim societies not to Islamic ideology but rather to Somalia’s “colonial experience,” pre-Arab Spring dictators, or Western countries “pumping weapons” into these countries. Another audience member spoke of Somalia’s “tribal roots.” “I don’t think you put blame on one individual,” Varisco meanwhile responded to the black man’s query about responsibility for Afghan violence following Terry Jones Koran burning. Absolving Muslim murderers and other criminals at least partly from their individual responsibility, Varisco analogized to an arsonist setting alight a carelessly tended house.

In all, Varisco’s briefing exposed much of modern academia’s shallowness. True to multicultural shibboleth, Varisco refused to identify any uniquely disturbing aspects of Islam and dismissed all past aversion towards this faith as prejudice. Varisco’s minimalist treatment of Spencer, meanwhile, accorded with an unwillingness to respect this lucidly insightful scholar. Rather, Varisco grouped Spencer with far more lightweight individuals like Chick and Richardson with whom Catholics like Spencer or his colleague Robert Muise of the American Freedom Law Center have little commonality. The expressed worries of Varisco, Esposito, and others, however, give hope that their efforts to silence their opposition will fail.

Andrew E. Harrod is a freelance researcher and writer who holds a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a JD from George Washington University Law School. He is a fellow with the Lawfare Project, an organization combating the misuse of human rights law against Western societies. You may follow Harrod on twitter at @AEHarrod.

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herb benty

Saudi-funded Georgetown also headed up the recent march to D.C. in opposition to Keystone XL pipeline from Canada. The Saudi’s don’t want an energy independent America. Canada has more oil than the Saudi’s, cheaper and possibly 150-200 YEARS worth.

http://libertyandculture.blogspot.com/ Jason P

Do you have some links for this information. I’d like to read more.

herb benty

Fox News.com for the students from Georgetown and other colleges against Keystone, Ezra Levant. com with Ethical Oil, Sunnewsnetwork.ca and Canada’s Oilsands has a website too.

Early on the Keystone Pipeline folks had a great ad titled “Ethical Oil.” The message was that the US should do the ethically right thing and buy oil from Canada instead of buying it from jihadist sponsoring, human dignity crushing countries in the Middle East. Sadly, the Jesuit educational institutions used to put a high priority on the importance of ethics and morality, but those noble ideals seemed to have disappeared from their mission.

herb benty

Your sort of right. Ezra Levant is the man behind Ethical Oil- Canada’s Oilsands. By Ethical, he meant how Canada uses all the latest techniques to retrieve the oil from the ground, ie., recycling the water we use, doing all we can to mitigate pollution etc. which is the last thing on the minds of OPEC and the Communist sourses. But you were right about the not buying from gay-murdering, women as second class, Western hating sourses, that is part of the “Ethical” too. The RCC ” Inquisition”or as it is now known, “The Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith” together with the Jesuit order were formed to destroy Protestantism, plain and simple.

Paul Waliser

The Lavender Mafia needs to be purged from the Roam Catholic clergy so our institutions can stand up to for what is Judeo-Christian.

pennant8

If I had been in the audience, I would have asked this question. Professor Varisco, what’s your take on Koran 98:6?

“I have no desire to debate…….I would never give a forum”
Of course not…..the Left CAN’T “debate” anyone—their ideas simply will not stand up to direct cross and rational discourse. Like many fungi their ideas can’t stand sunlight.
Plus the Left can only get things done by lying to people about their goals and plans. If people knew how they really felt about them and what they really had planned they would run screaming into the night.
Besides the whole idea of “root causes” etc. is nonsense. After all the historical facts are Islamic hordes invade the West long before the West ever “colonized” anything.
Maybe we should adopt his POV. After al if Islam had not taken over all the formerly Christian nations in the ME then invaded Spain and Europe, multiple times perhaps they would not be having so many problems now.

wileyvet

What do these white American muslim lovers and Islamic apologists like Varisco and Esposito and the dreadful Karen Armstrong get out of this? They can totally disregard the history and teaching of Islam, and its implementation around the world today, and have nothing but praise for it, and condemnation for its critics. Long live Robert Spencer et al for their honesty, clarity and courage in revealing the truth and consequences of Islam.

objectivefactsmatter

“What do these white American muslim lovers and Islamic apologists like Varisco and Esposito and the dreadful Karen Armstrong get out of this?”

Money and notoriety among their peers, plus the sense that all of their childish delusions are correct and the world is only a harsh place because of the people that disagree with them.

objectivefactsmatter

“[f]ocus on interfaith efforts, noting that all religions have positive and negative aspects.”